Updated 12:24 pm, Friday, March 1, 2013

Reforming a convoluted and slow-moving visa system is the linchpin of any new immigration law, say experts closely watching proposals by the president and legislators.

A big argument is over what to do about the estimated 11 million people here illegally. The concept of deporting them all has largely moved to the fringes of the debate. With an estimated average cost of between $12,500 to $23,000 per deportation, the money just isn't there for widespread deportation.

But even if the money were there, the political will isn't. That point was driven home last year when the Republican Party of Texas changed its platform to oppose mass deportation.

But the real question, experts say, is what will prevent another massive influx of illegal immigration?

In 1986, then-president Ronald Reagan signed a law giving legal status to 3 million of the 5 million immigrants believed to be in the country illegally at the time. Nearly three decades later, the number of people here illegally has more than doubled.

What's to stop that from happening again?

The solution, the experts say, is fixing a dysfunctional visa system that creates long, unnecessary lines and discourages legal immigration.

“The problem is there are not enough immigrant visas available for relatives or for workers, and the process to immigrate them is too convoluted,” said San Antonio immigration attorney Joe De Mott. “People get frustrated trying to come in here legally and just go ahead and come without permission and hope for the best. If the system were more streamlined, ran more efficiently, people would be more apt to wait their turn.”

In January, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was granting visas to the Mexican siblings of U.S. citizens who applied before July 22, 1996. A year before, USCIS was granting visas to the Mexican citizen siblings of Americans who applied in May of 1996. What's the incentive for the brother or sister of a U.S. citizen to take the legal road to enter this country when he or she will have to wait so long for a visa, De Mott wonders.

The line for work visas isn't as long, but it's not conducive to running a business, DeMott says. A clothing store owner who applies to bring in a tailor from Mexico has to wait almost six years before the employee's visa will be approved, DeMott said.

He advocates allocating more visas each year to speed the line up. But that gives rise to a new debate about who should be given preference to come here and work.

In her book “Beside the Golden Door: U.S. Immigration Reform in a New Era of Globalization” (co-written with economics professor Madeline Zavodny), Pia Orrenius, an assistant vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, advocates making economic need the top priority in reforming the visa system.

In an interview, Orrenius said that the U.S. should be allowing more highly skilled workers to obtain green cards and should eliminate quotas that cause desirable immigrants to wait decades for visas because they're from countries with large numbers of people trying to emigrate to the U.S.

She argues that immigrants fill two important niches in the U.S. labor market; highly skilled workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics and low-skilled laborers. The U.S. immigration system is based on family reunification — there's no cap on the spouses, parents, and unmarried children younger than 21 of U.S. citizens who can enter the country. Orrenius says this doesn't help the economy.

“This is an emergency,” she said. “These are some important, high-skilled immigrants who are in interminable lines. And there's no reason to believe that they're staying in those lines. You're not going to be queuing and renewing your (temporary work permit) for decades.”

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples, as he eyes a run for lieutenant governor, has very publicly flogged the federal government for what he says is a failure to secure the border. His recently released book, “Broken Borders, Broken Promises,” takes a hawkish stance on border security, telling horror stories of Texas ranchers threatened by cartel activity.

Staples argues that reforming the visa system will help secure the border. And he strongly advocates a system that allows for more temporary agriculture workers.

“If we have a legal immigration system that meets the needs of our economy, it would tremendously free up existing resources, time and manpower to target the drug cartels,” he said.

John Naegelin, one of the owners at J&B Farms in Hondo, says he's frustrated by the hoops he has to jump through to hire temporary immigrant workers. Every year for the last four years he's brought in about 20 workers after going through a 70-day process that involves sending paperwork to Austin, Chicago and California, running ads in local newspapers and dealing with half-hearted job applicants who want the more-than-$10-an-hour wage, but don't want to do the work.

The problem, Naegelin said, isn't caps on visa numbers — he's able to hire as many workers as he needs once he slogs through the approval process — it's red tape. He'd like to see the process streamlined.

But not everyone is so sure visa reform needs to be strictly an economic issue. United We Dream, an advocacy organization created to promote a path to legal status for young immigrants brought here illegally as children, is focused on family reunification.

Calling it a “humanitarian issue,” Amanda Gutierrez, the group's advocacy analyst, said loosening visa limits and keeping families together should be a priority.

The government should allow immediate family members of lawful permanent residents to enter the country without waiting in line — there are no limits on the number of spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens allowed into the country each year — and consider a cap on waiting limits, Gutierrez said.

In a recent report titled “The American Dream Up for Sale: A Blueprint for Ending International Labor Recruitment Abuse,” a coalition of labor and civil rights groups said the guest worker program is riddled with abuses. Labor recruiters extract exorbitant fees, pushing workers into debt, and U.S. employers force them to work in substandard labor situations.

Guest workers cannot complain about their working conditions because they risk being blacklisted by recruiters, said Sarah Rempel, policy attorney at Centro de los Derechos del Migrante Inc., an immigrants rights group that took part in the report. To compound the problem, there are no centralized records of what companies are hiring temporary workers, or even how many guest workers are in the country, Rempel said.

Creating an agency to track and share that information would make guest worker programs safer and more humane, she said.

“There is a lack of data about who is really in the United States, how they get here, how long they stay,” Rempel said.

Centro de los Derechos del Migrante is joined in their call for a more transparent guest worker program by Numbers USA, a group that wants to reduce the number of immigrants, legal and illegal, entering the country.

Numbers USA president Roy Beck flatly rejects the argument that the number of visas or green cards issued every year should be increased. Centralizing and making public more information about work permits would make the system more transparent and ensure that permits are only being issued in industries that suffer from a shortage of U.S. workers, Beck said. But he also wants to limit family green cards to the spouses and minor children of citizens and green card holders.

“The green card numbers should be cut in half,” Beck said. “Not only should there not be increases, they should be cut in half. It's as if everybody talking about this is trying to pretend there aren't 20 million people (in the U.S.) who can't get a job.”